You're Invited to Capla-Con 2025!

My annual festival of nerddom is July 12-13

Greetings from Tokyo!

Every summer, I host Capla-Con, a two-day festival of nerddom.

This year, Capla-Con will be at Carow Hall (4460 Rockfish Creek Lane) on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University on July 12 and 13, noon-midnight both days. All friends of GMU econ and Bet On It are invited, along with their family and friends, as well as their family and friends, unto infinity. As always at my events, kids of all ages are super welcome.

Doesn’t that open door policy get crazy? So far, so good: Attendance has always converged to a finite sum, usually about 80-100 unique attendees.

What happens at Capla-Con? All of the following:

• Board games

• Role-playing games

• LARPing

• Party games

• Karaoke

• Socializing

• Making friends

• Finding true love

• Eating (snacks all day; dinner provided both days)

• Fandom (mildly famous people routinely attend, and I’ve never known them to refuse a request to sign a book or take a pic)

• In-person Ask Me Anythings (if you’re eminent and want to run one, just let me know)

Want to organize or run a game? Have a game you’ve always wanted to play, but couldn’t find the players? Capla-Con is the perfect venue for you.

Traditionally, I’ve publicized Capla-Con via a dedicated Facebook group, but this year I’m migrating event info over to an all-new Substack, caplacon.substack.com. Subscribe there so you receive Capla-Con invitations well into the 2060s at least. (Like all good economists, I am guaranteed at least 90 years of healthy life).

Every Capla-Con, I write an original role-playing game. This year’s new release: “The Orphans of Stanford,” a Pulp adventure for a ragtag team of undergraduates studying at Leland Stanford Junior University in 1924. The idea is still brewing in my head, but I promise a plot twist that I’ve never before employed.

Other RPGs on the menu for me to run include: “NMZ,” a near-future K-drama, “Freedom’s Charm,” a Jamaican slave revolt adventure, “The Great Khan of Kamakura,” a samurai/ninja (“jidaigeki”) story set during the second Mongol invasion of Japan, and “The Deliverance of Masada,” a Biblical epic. These are all original stories personally written and gamemastered by me, though the last is a reimagining of a game Glen Whitman once told me about.

I realize that not all Bet On It readers will be attending Capla-Con, so I’ll keep any further Capla-Con updates on Bet On It to a minimum. Want to stay in the loop? To repeat, subscribe to the Capla-Con Substack, which in turn will allow you to organize games, ask questions, coordinate carpools, and much more.

Hope you can make it!

P.S. At Capla-Con, I am usually pre-occupied with the games I’m running, but never be afraid to introduce yourself. ;-)